r feeling so terribly, if I ever do."

"Now, really," insisted Uncle Bob, "I don't see why you should worry.
You are almost certain to meet him again, and----"

"I shall die if I do," Margaret Elizabeth declared; but somehow the
assertion failed to ring true.

"From what you have said he is plainly a gentleman, and altogether
matters might be worse," Uncle Bob concluded.

Miss Bentley shook her head. "I don't see how they could be," she
insisted.

CHAPTER SEVEN

_Shows how the Candy Wagon is visited in behalf of the Squirrel, and
how pride suffers a fall; how Miss Bentley turns to Vedantic Philosophy
to drown her annoyance, and discovers how hard it is to forget when you
wish to._

"When I reflect upon the small weight attaching to true worth
unsupported by personal charm, I am tempted to turn cynic."

Dr. Prue closed her bag with a snap and lifted her arms to adjust a
hatpin.

"Youth and beauty take the trick, that's a fact." Uncle Bob laughed as
if he found it a delicious comedy.

They stood before the office window. At the gate the Apartment Pigeons
were fluttering around Margaret Elizabeth, while her ladyship gravely
admonished them for some piece of mischief.

"I believe she is taming the terrors," remarked the doctor.

"She had them all in the other afternoon," said Uncle Bob, "sitting
cross-legged on the floor like little Orientals, while she told them
stories. Margaret Elizabeth can manage them!" His tone thrilled with
pride.

"Yes, and Miss Kitty Molloy will drop anything she has on hand to work
for Miss Bentley; the market-man picks out his choicest fruit for her;
and so it goes, if you call it managing. Well, I must be off. Good-by."

As Dr. Prue went out, Margaret Elizabeth, having dismissed the pigeons
for the time being, came in, and sat down at her desk to finish a
letter.

She wrote: "Yes, Uncle Bob and Cousin Prue argue as much as ever, and
I suspect that more often than not I am the subject upon which they
disagree. I am in a state of disagreement about myself, father dear.
Society is absorbing beyond anything I dreamed of, and if I had not
promised you to stop and think for at least ten minutes out of the
fourteen hundred and forty, I fear I should have already become a real
Society Person."

At this point Uncle Bob looked in. "Well, how many parties on hand now?"
he asked.

Margaret Elizabeth laid down her pen and counted them off on her
fingers, beginning with a tea a